Pay Discrimination Myths from the AAUW

Article here. Excerpt:

'Equal Pay Day is coming up on April 14. That means it's time for false statistics and legal claims from groups pushing for more rules and red tape governing employee pay, such as the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act.

On April 10, Linda D. Hallman, Executive Director of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), sent a mass email containing two false claims. The first alleged that "women have to work almost four months longer than men do to earn the same amount of money for doing the same job."  This is a fundamental misinterpretation of a statistic that itself is obsolete and years out of date. 

It is based on a much-repeated and much-debunked statistic that women make 77 percent as much as men do. That statistic was obsolete in 2013, when former Chief Labor Department economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth noted:

"The 77 percent figure is bogus because it averages all full-time women, no matter what education and profession, with all full-time men. Even with such averaging, the latest Labor Department figures show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men’s wages. For men and women who work 40 hours weekly, the ratio is 88 percent."

Another reason women earn less than men on average is that women work fewer hours on average than men even when they work full-time.'